November 16, 2011

I’ll be visiting my mom’s seventh grade classroom on Monday, but I won’t be helping with a lesson plan as I usually do. This time I am the lesson plan. Apparently they want to have a formal business meeting with me, which to seventh graders means rearranging the classroom into a long conference table and coming to school in formal clothes. They’re even preparing agenda items they want to talk about. I’m really looking forward to it, but I will obviously need to prepare a bit more than just rolling out of bed as I usually do.

My mom and I had a lengthy conversation about this on IM, in particular about what types of advice they’re looking for and reflecting back on when I was in seventh grade. I’ve thought deeply about the path to where I am now, but I hadn’t really considered my parents’ perspective much on that. My mom provided this thought on the subject:

One thing interesting to me is that you pretty much started when you were their age, or just a bit older and we never understood it at all. So you were very open with us, and we “friended” you and stuff and finally we could see that it was very strange but good and we left you alone. But you always said you wanted to work for yourself and you always had some sort of vision that was very long-term, or some feeling of which direction to follow as different choices came up that would end up working for you. And you also knew when to get out. So, maybe it’s about trusting yourself?

There’s a lot of meat in that paragraph. I spent years alone on the family computer in our basement. And my parents paid attention to it, participated sometimes, funded it, talked to me about it. I’m fascinated that there was this thing that I was doing, and my parents just let me do it without really knowing what it was or what would come of it. They just trusted me and that taught me to trust myself.

October 8, 2011

Talking to my brother about shit umbrellas, which is a concept I read about in this TechCrunch article, then applied in my senior project at CMU. Sometimes you have people who can’t do the actual project, but they can clear the way for you to get the real work done. My brother’s now using this in building a race car at RPI.

October 7, 2011

This was an incredibly difficult article for me to write, but I feel much better having written it. Steve Jobs was a huge influence on me, and although I never said one word to him, I have felt his presence throughout my life. This is a very personal and emotional article.

July 26, 2011

This is really a note for myself, as I keep having to do this on my home machine and it’s a bit difficult to find online.

When you need services like SSH or VNC (in Mac OS X this is called “screen sharing” in your system preferences) to listen to a different port on your computer, you can use the ipfw command to forward ports internally on your computer. This case may come up where you are on an internal network and unable to port forward the default ports for these services to yourself, or where you just want to use a different port for multiple connections. It can be difficult to change the ports these services listen to on Macs, and for VNC there is really no way at all to make this change except with ipfw. This is a powerful command, changing the way your computer connects to the Internet, so be very careful with it.

Use this command to list the current rules in your ipfw config:
sudo ipfw list

Use this command to forward port 12345 (or whatever port you like) to your VNC at port 5900:
sudo ipfw add fwd 127.0.0.1,5900 tcp from any to me dst-port 12345

Use this command to forward port 11111 to SSH at port 22:
sudo ipfw add fwd 127.0.0.1,22 tcp from any to me dst-port 11111